


Something Borrowed

by ProfessorSpork



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Bittersweet, Closure, Comfort/Angst, F/M, Gen, Past Relationship(s), Pete's World
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-07-12
Updated: 2010-07-12
Packaged: 2019-08-24 00:37:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,739
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16629521
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ProfessorSpork/pseuds/ProfessorSpork
Summary: After sacrificing himself to save the universe from the exploding Pandorica, the Doctor ends up in the least expected of places: the Tyler family's backyard on Pete's World.A bittersweet reunion.





	Something Borrowed

**Author's Note:**

> Written for a Then There's Us ficathon; originally posted to LJ July 12, 2010.

(He’d known the cracks were bad because they hadn’t seemed dangerous to him at all.

It wasn’t like looking across a crowded room at Jack Harkness—something unnatural and painful and wrong, itching at his skin. No; the cracks were _interesting_ , and deliciously tempting, because who knew what could be on the other side? “Two points in space and time that should never have touched,” he’d said, and, well… isn’t that what _he_ is? What she’d been, once, albeit briefly. A part of him couldn’t help but hope that just maybe she’d slip through and come back to him.

He never imagined it would be _he_ who slipped through to get to _her._ )

“I think I’ll skip the rest of the rewind,” he says, getting up. “I hate repeats.” Leaving Amelia Pond to wake up to a kinder future, he lets the white light overtake him.

When he blinks, he’s standing on a large lawn behind an opulent mansion, feeling more solid than he has in hours.

He _knows_ he’s been here before. He raps his knuckles sharply against his forehead several times in an attempt to get his brain to work faster, muttering under his breath. Just as it hits him— _he’d run from Cybermen once on this lawn, wearing a cursed tux, Rose’s hand in his_ —a little Charlifraxan girl comes round from the side of the house, her green skull-fronds pulled into adorable pigtails on either side of her head.

In the time it takes for him to wonder _what on earth is a Charlifraxan doing here_ he already has his answer. After all, he’d always had a penchant for picking up strays.

A metacrisis can only change so much about a bloke.

She toddles over to him as if strangers popped into existence in their yard every day. “What’re you doing on Pete and Jackie’s lawn?” she asks, in English too perfect not to be aided by a TARDIS. (So the coral’s growing, then. That’s good.)

“Standing about,” he replies, crouching down to her eye-level. “What’re _you_ doing?”

“Waiting for Tony to come home. He’s at school. And… you’re an alien.”

“So are you,” the Doctor says mildly. “But wait a moment—why aren’t _you_ at school?”

She tugs on a pigtail and raises one eye ridge as if to say _duh_.

“Ah. Yes. I can see how that would be a problem. I’m the Doctor; what’s your name?”

She looks at him skeptically. “You can’t be the Doctor. _The Doctor’s_ the Doctor.”

“What, you’ve never met two people with the same name before?”

“Not when that name’s _Doctor_ ,” she scoffs, and he finds himself growing exceedingly fond of this rude, not-ginger girl. “I’m Donazkipell, but everyone here calls me Donna.”

_Oh._ “I…” he starts, then swallows the lump forming in his throat. “I had a very good friend named Donna, once. It’s a good name; you should look after it.”

“That’s what _he_ always says.”

He blinks. “Does he? Well, you should listen to him. The Doctor’s always right.” Upon reflection, he amends, “Unless he disagrees with Rose; then Rose is always right. But don’t tell her I said that.”

Donna giggles. “What happened to her? To the other Donna, I mean, not Rose. No one will ever tell me.”

His Adam’s apple bobs desperately as he searches for an answer. “She… she had to move on. She fell in love, you see. Got married.”

“Do you miss her?”

“Oh, terribly. It’s always hard, to lose a friend.”

Donna considers this, and chews on her lip in a decidedly Rose-like fashion as she thinks. “It’s okay,” she finally says, her eyes lighting up, “ _I’ll_ be your friend.”

His mouth twitches into a smile. “Thank you,” he says, “I appreciate that.”

There’s the sound of a car on the driveway, the slam of doors, and then—like bells ringing—the most cherished voice: “Donna?”

“In back, Rose!” Donna calls, never once taking her eyes off his. “The Doctor is here!”

“Of course he’s here,” Rose laughs, getting closer by the second, “he’s standing right next to—” she finally breaks into view and her breath hitches at the sight of him. “…me.”

The half-human Doctor catches up and nearly bowls Rose over, as she’s frozen to the spot. When he realizes what she’s looking at, he grows very still.

“Ah,” he says, wide-eyed.

(Tony, undisturbed, runs over to Donna and starts chattering away excitedly about what he’d learned in school that day. The water cycle, apparently. And at snack time they’d had apple juice.)

“Ah,” echoes the Time Lord, standing back up as the children wander away. Suddenly feeling as though he has nothing to do with his hands, he gives a feeble, flailing wave. “Hello.”

“Hello,” smiles Rose, with a quaver in her voice and tears in her eyes. And then, before he can even prepare himself, she’s in his arms—tiny hands slipping up through his jacket, lacing themselves into his braces at his shoulder blades. He’s roughly the same height as he was ( _is_ , to her), and so her face rests exactly where it should on his chest: pillowed in the space between his hearts.

He wasn’t lying when he said he hated repeats, but this is… this is truly something new. (And old. Borrowed, he thinks, meeting his own eyes across the lawn, and the bluest he’s felt in ages. In this moment, all of his subtle hints to Amelia come back to haunt him—and for a single, selfish second, he hopes she never figures it out.)

“What is it? What’s gone wrong?” the man he used to be asks, because they both know Rose never will.

“Oh, everything,” he says, stroking Rose’s back with one hand and twining his fingers through her hair with the other. “For me, anyway. Cracks in the universe. Had to fly the Pandorica into the exploding TARDIS to seal them up, but the price is… is me.”

“That’s… not possible.”

“Not even a little,” he agrees amicably. “I should be in the Void, by any sense of logic. It appears I overshot a bit.”

“I don’t mean that,” protests the other Doctor, “I mean it’s… you can’t mean that. Wibbly-wobbly paradoxes aside, it’s not even… the Pandorica is a fairy tale.”

He wants to say _I thought so, too_ but he can’t, because—well—he just proved that by saying it, didn’t he? “Guess what’s inside it,” he says instead, eyes dancing with mirth. “Go on, guess.”

The Doctor in Converse’s eyes flicker back to Rose. “The beast from Krop Tor?” he ventures, truly stumped. “Honestly, I haven’t the foggiest. What?”

“Me.”

And then he laughs. “Oh, that’s—you _would_.”

The Doctor in the bow tie smiles primly. _It’s only funny when it happens to someone else,_ he thinks, and then realizes that that distance might be the greatest gift he ever gave himself. Well, second to Rose, of course.

“But wait,” murmurs Rose, as if she could sense his attention had shifted back to her, “how can that be possible? Not the Pandorica stuff, but the—the other thing. The price is you. What does that mean?”

“It means that, in order to restore reality, I made it so that I’d never been born. I’ve never existed at all.”

“Then how are you here?”

“And what’s keeping _me_ here?” asks his once-doppelganger, looking stricken.

“Donna, probably. You’re still tethered by her half. Assuming I’m not hallucinating you in the first place, which we really can’t rule out.” He removes his hand from Rose’s hair to wave it about a bit, checking for pixelation. Just in case.

“But that _can’t_ be right, Doctor,” Rose argues, and the ease with which his name falls from her tongue sends a shiver down his spine. “When I was… when I was looking for you, I found a world where you didn’t—where you and Donna never met. And it was a terrible world. Brutal and heartless and cold. And that was just a few years with you gone. How can the Earth—how can the _universe_ —survive centuries without you?”

“I have no idea,” he admits slowly. “It’s okay, though; I’m almost positive that this is all just a very good dream, so there’s really nothing to worry about. None of this is real.”

He recognizes the twinkle in the eyes that used to be his. “Of course it’s happening inside your head, Harry,” the pinstriped Doctor quotes, “but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?”

“Spoilers!” the Doctor in tweed yelps, moving quickly to cover Rose’s ears—he knows for a fact that she has not _(yet)_ read the books. Realizing what he’s just said, he releases her so that he can instead clamp both hands over his mouth, mortified.

Rose is miffed; the other Doctor just raises an eyebrow.

“Sorry, it’s just… do you hear that?”

They shake their heads.

He listens harder, and—yes. An unintelligible whisper rings in his ears, and it sounds just like Amy Pond.

“Time to go, I think,” he says, and Rose pulls away from him.

He waits for a joke about the bow tie that never comes. She just fiddles needlessly at his collar, straightens his lapels, and steps back with a look in her eyes he’s never seen before. It is a look, he realizes, that he knows in experience only—a look he himself has given many times. To Martha, not far in the past. To Tegan and Romana, and Jo before them, and to Susan, oh, _so_ long ago now.

It is the look of letting someone beloved walk away.

He blinks and Rose is gone, replaced by the interior of the TARDIS. He’s traded his usual outfit for a tux, though (not the ~~jinxed~~ old one, but a dapper number with a truly magnificent hat) and maybe that is legacy enough.

There’s a knock. “Okay, Doctor,” asks Amy’s voice through the wood, “did I surprise you this time?”

He whips open the door and sticks his head out anxiously, schooling his face into something more like happiness. “Ah, yeah. Completely astonished.” He looks Amy up and down, expectant and stunning in her wedding down. Spots Rory behind her, clearly trying to look annoyed but unable to keep the grin off his face. Amy ventures a smile. He is, he realizes, truly happy to see them again.

“Never expected that,” he says.


End file.
